April 17, 1907: America's Biggest Day for Immigration

Ellis Island

April 17, 1907: The registrars at Ellis Island, the U.S. immigration station in the Hudson River, outside New York City, process 11,747 immigrants. As far as the surviving records can determine, it is the largest number of them in a single day. And 1907 would also be the largest calendar year for them: Over 1 million.

From the 1840s onward, due to the Irish Potato Famine, and the fact that so many jobs similar to the ones they already had were available, such as factory work and coal mining, the largest group of immigrants to America were from the British Isles: England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. By the 1880s, political and religious upheavals in the Russian Empire and Southern Europe sent Jews and Eastern Orthodox Catholics to our shores.

The immigrants from Southern, Mediterranean Europe -- Italy, mostly from Naples on south, and Greece and the various lands that would one day make up Yugoslavia -- were darker-skinned, due to more sunlight, but also due to centuries of intermarrying with Africans from across the Mediterranean.

Anti-immigrant sentiment has been an evil part of American life from the beginning, when those who, ahem, immigrated on the Mayflower in Massachusetts, and on the Susan Constant, the Discovery, and the Godspeed in Virginia, looked down on anyone who came later. It was bad for the Irish, whom English editorial cartoonists often drew as apelike.

But for the darker-skinned ones coming later? In 1896, one New York newspaper writer wrote, "The floodgates are open. The bars are down. The sally-ports are unguarded. The dam is washed away. The sewer is unchoked. Europe is vomiting! In other words, the scum of immigration is viscerating upon our shores." (I have looked for a source for this quote, so I could name and shame its composer, but have been unsuccessful.)

And yet, up until "the valve was shut off" in the 1920s, they kept coming, and the vast majority of people alive in America today are descended from those 1845-1924 immigrants. And they assimilated, becoming fully American, while still maintaining many of the traditions of their homeland.

America has often been called a "melting pot," where all the ingredients disappear and create one flavor. It's also been denied, and more accurately compared to a "stewpot": You can still see the pieces of vegetable and the chunks of meat, but the overall flavor is better than any of those items alone.

Sometimes, the assimilation doesn't take hold with the immigrants, who are too tied culturally to the land they were so desperate to escape -- or, if they were better-off, didn't come out of desperation, but out of a chance to make more money, and thus had more reason to still be what they once were, rather than American. Rather, it's the children who become fully American.

In my hometown in New Jersey, I knew plenty of children of immigrants from India, China and Korea who ended up speaking with a New York accent as strong as those of the 3rd-generation-American (grandchildren of immigrants) Italian and Jewish kids in town -- or even, being that it was the 1980s, talking like "Valley Girls," hearing that kind of talk on TV and in movies and adopting it as their own preferred style, even though California was all the way across the country.

My favorite story of the immigrant experience was of a letter dated August 3, 1903, to a newspaper, the Jewish Daily Forward, which, despite the rising cost of ink and paper, still serves New York's Jewish community today. The author wrote:

It makes sense to teach a child to play chess. What is the point of a crazy game like baseball? Here, in educated America, adults play baseball. They run after a leather ball like children. I want my boy to grow up to be a mensch, not a wild American runner. But he cries his head off!

This letter was quoted in Ken Burns' 1994 Baseball miniseries, read by actor Eli Wallach, who was one of those sons of Jewish immigrants, in his case from a town in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but now, with the changing of borders, in southeastern Poland. Fortunately for Eli, his father quickly took to baseball, and taught his son to love the game, too. The response, by the editor, Abraham Kahane, was read by Alan King, a fellow Brooklynite, whose parents came from Russia proper:

Dear Sir: Let your boy play baseball, and play it well, so long as it does not interfere with his education, or get him in to bad company. Let us not so raise the children that they should grow up foreigners in their own birthplace.

Kahane gave the man the loopholes of education and "bad company." But he had a point: You chose to come to this country. Your son did not. And, given all that is used against immigrants and their children -- especially when race and religion get thrown into the mix -- anything that helps them more feel as though America is their country, too, helps.

UPDATE: In 2025, I finally found a definitive date for one of my ancestors reaching America. On February 25, 1909, on the Laura, Pawel Pachołek, an 18-year-old hatmaker from Borki Wielkie in the northeast of Poland, arrived in New York. Settling in Newark, New Jersey, he slightly anglicized his name to Paul Pacholek. He lived until 1961. I was born 8 years later, his first great-grandchild.

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April 17, 1907 was a Wednesday. These baseball games were played that day:

* The New York Highlanders beat the Philadelphia Athletics, 5-4 at Hilltop Park in Upper Manhattan. The Highlanders, who became the Yankees in 1913, scored 3 runs in the bottom of the 9th to win.

* The New York Giants beat the Brooklyn Superbas, 2-1 in 10 innings at Washington Park in Brooklyn. The Superbas became the Dodgers in 1911.

* The Boston Americans beat the Washington Senators, 2-1 at the Huntington Avenue Grounds in Boston. The Americans became the Red Sox the next year.

* The Boston Doves beat the Philadelphia Phillies, 2-1 at National League Park (later Baker Bowl) in Philadelphia. The Dovey brothers would sell their team to William Russell in 1911, and they became the Boston Rustlers. He soon died, and the team was bought in 1912 by James Gaffney, an official in New York's Tammany Hall political organization, a "Brave," and he renamed them the Boston Braves.

* The Chicago Cubs beat the Pittsburgh Pirates, 6-2 at Exposition Park in Pittsburgh. Honus Wagner went 1-for-4 with an RBI.

* The Cincinnati Reds beat the St. Louis Cardinals, 8-3 at The Palace of the Fans in Cincinnati.

* The Chicago White Sox beat the Detroit Tigers, 4-1 at Bennett Park in Detroit. Ty Cobb went 0-for-3 with a walk.

* And the Cleveland Naps beat the St. Louis Browns, 5-2 at Sportsman's Park in St. Louis. Napoleon "Nap" Lajoie, the slugger, 2nd baseman and manager for whom the Cleveland team was named, went 2-for-4. The Naps became the Indians in 1915, and the Guardians in 2022. The Browns moved, becoming the Baltimore Orioles in 1954.